Bitter Angels (7 page)

My gaze slid sideways to Misao. His finger was twitching, wanting to tap out some command on the tabletop. He’d spoken with certainty. A year away from a war, he’d said. But Jerimiah said she’d only been looking for the proof. Either he’d lied to me, or they’d learned something Misao hadn’t told me yet.

Hadn’t told me and wouldn’t tell me until I took the oath again.

I turned back to Jerimiah. “Then what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jerimiah muttered angrily. “I don’t
know
. She died. She died with me in her mind, and I don’t know how!”

Suspicion bloomed hot and horrendous inside me. “You said you had her last words!” I snapped at Misao. “You said she asked for me!”

“He had to play her last words for me too,” said Jerimiah. “Some of my surviving nodes became disconnected, and I was not able to reintegrate them.”

“I’m ready, Bianca.”

“Okay. Okay.” That was Bianca’s husky alto, instantly recognizable to me. But it wasn’t the easy, laughing voice I knew so well. It was choking, raw and filled with tears.

“…Oh…Oh…it is my time. My time…I didn’t believe this day would come…I’d only hoped…I’d prayed…But here it is. Finally, here it is. Oh, Jerimiah, you can tell them…Please tell them, Terese really is the one I want to replace me. It’s true. I swear. Bring her in and it’ll fall into place…I swear, I swear, I swear…No one else can make it work. Make sure they know, and make sure they know it was me who said it. They’ll listen to you. Please, tell them.”

I couldn’t move. Sweat, or perhaps a tear, trickled down my cheek, and I still couldn’t move. In the threshold, Jerimiah bowed his head.

“I’ll tell them, Bianca. Don’t worry. I’m here with you.”

“Thank you, Jerimiah. Thank you. Oh, God, I’m shaking. I wanted so much…Well…Good-bye!”

“Good-bye, Bianca.”

A snap, a shuffle of cloth, and a soft thump, and silence. Silence stretching out until it felt like pain.

“Thank you, Jerimiah,” said Misao.

Jerimiah looked up, his face blank and bleak, and more than a little ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. Then he turned and walked away, and the shield darkened, becoming a blank covering for the door again.

I was shaking. I was as cold as if there were nothing between me and the winter outside. It was too hard, too much. Too many memories flooded me, drowning thought.
I could barely breathe. I was going to be sick in another minute.

“I can’t,” I whispered.
“I can’t
.”

Misao pressed both palms against the desk. I don’t know what he was going to say. I never found out. At that moment, a chime sounded on my set followed immediately by a voice.

“Terese? I’m in the lobby.”

It was David.

I touched my set to acknowledge the call. “Excuse me,” I said to Misao.

I walked out into the hall. The door closed after me.

I hate doors. I hate hearing them open and shut. I hate the drafts and the clanks, the rattles and the clicks. I hate them closing in front of me, or behind me. After all this time, after all the therapy and regrowth, I still hate doors.

I moved back through the busy labyrinth by instinct and memory rather than conscious thought. It wasn’t until I had my hand on the palm reader which, on the near side, would verify that I had the legal right to walk out of this building that I even realized I’d made it back to the lobby.

And there stood David, and beside him, pale and defiant, stood Jo.

We stared at each other in silence for a long time. David’s face creased up tight, trying to find some kind of expression that suited the clamor inside him. I stood in front of him, slump-shouldered and exhausted.

To make matters even more surreal, I noticed that we weren’t alone. Vijay and Siri occupied one corner of the lobby. I don’t know how those two got there ahead of me,
but my old team and my family cast sideways glances at each other, neither side quite sure who that was over there.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I couldn’t do either. I couldn’t even move.

David touched Jo’s arm. “I’ll talk to your mother alone. You’ve still got that plane to catch.”

Jo tilted her chin up. “Not until I’m sure she’s not going to do something stupid.” She projected an air of righteousness that can only come from someone who hasn’t even finished her third decade.

I felt Siri’s eyes burning into the back of my neck.

“It’ll be all right,” said David softly to Jo. “I’ll meet you there.”

I didn’t think Jo was going to listen at first. She stepped toward me. “See you back home,” she said. Then she turned and walked out, tall and confident: confident that she had successfully removed my choices, confident she had saved me from myself.

Anger surfaced: a parent’s strange, uncomfortable anger at a child who simply doesn’t
understand
. It is an awful anger, because you’re only getting angry at the reflections of your mistakes.

Siri walked up beside me. “Mother? Then this is…”

“David Drajeske.” David held out his hand.

“Siri Baijahn.” Siri shook his hand, because what else was she going to do? Her eyes were hard as she sized him up, and she flickered a glance at me to say,
This is what you left us for? This exhausted, aging, worried man?

Family telepathy.

“Vijay Kochinski.” David and Vijay shook hands. This time the glance went between Siri and Vijay and I felt the
current of implied understanding, but of what I couldn’t tell, and my anger redoubled.

“Not here,” I said to David. I walked past him and pushed open the doors.
Let Vijay and Siri take that back to the boss
.

David followed me in silence, and I let him keep following me. I’d be damned if I was going to talk to him where Misao, and Vijay, and Siri could listen in. I was not going to turn around and say, “What were you thinking!” “Why are you doing this?” or “What on
earth
made you bring Jo into this?” where they could hear me do it. More than that: I was not going to open my mouth until I had at least some idea what was going to come out.

The top of Daley Tower 4 has a living roof: a beautiful green and flowering formal garden, shielded from the harsh winds and winters. There is even a marble fountain carved in a very bad classical Greek-revival style.

I pushed open the door, gritting my teeth as the clean, conifer-scented air wafted over me. It was full dark, and there were only a few footlights on to show us the white-gravel pathways. The winter city, with its colored lights and veins of darkness, spread around us. The shields didn’t filter out the noise, and I could hear Chicago’s rushing, enervating cacophony.

I stalked down the central path. We had the place to ourselves. The fountain had been switched off for the night and its central faun was giving me a sarcastic look.

I sank down on a granite bench and looked out across the ledge.

“They got to you, didn’t they?” David breathed. “You would have re-upped.”

“How did you know?”

Of course. I could picture Jo pacing the boarding lounge at the ’port, trying to make up her mind. I could picture her face, the stern set of her jaw the moment her internal righteousness won out and she ordered her set to connect to her father, so she could tell him I was about to betray them even before I was sure myself.

But then, perhaps I was wrong. David was an experienced investigator, after all. He had lived with me for the same thirty-five years I’d lived with him. He might have been the one to call Jo.

“I’m sorry, David. Really.” I was. Honestly, truly. Sorry about more things than I could count.

But David had never let me take the easy way out, and he wasn’t about to now. When he walked into my line of sight, he was shaking. His big, competent hands trembled though he held them in tight fists at his side.

“That’s all you’ve got to say?” he whispered. He wasn’t a shouter, my David. The more angry he got, the more intense and passionate, the softer his voice grew. “You promised! You swore you were done!”

Anger, sluggish and bitter as old blood, dripped into the place where I kept my love for David. If you want to get a good fury going, there’s nothing like guilt for fuel. I didn’t want him here. He did not belong here. This was my other life, from before our family existed. I had traveled back in time. He had no right to follow me. Why couldn’t he just go
away?

“You say you trust me? How about trusting me enough to believe I’ll come back!”
Go away, go home, don’t BE here. This isn’t your life. There’s no room for you here!

Disbelief slackened David’s features. He rallied, but it
was a slow process. Like me, he was swimming against the current of the years. He walked to the low wall that circled the rooftop, to look at the restless sparks of city light. He spread his hands on the ledge, leaning all his weight on them as if testing the strength of the stone.

As if testing the strength of himself.

“How can you go back to the Guardians, Terese?” he said finally. “They broke you into pieces.”

“They didn’t break me. That was the Redeemers.” The hands slick with my blood, and the pain and the filthy faces grinning and crooning about the will of God…

“The Guardians sent you.”

“I volunteered. I knew the risks.” Flash anger, hot and fresh, pulled me to my feet and clenched my fists. “Damn it, stop blaming the Guardians!”

“Why?” David swung around. “You’ve blamed them for years!”

I had. I did. My knees shook. “I might have been wrong,” I whispered.

“
Now
you tell me.”

I stared at him, my eyes stinging with exhaustion and emotion, and the sound that emerged from my open mouth was the last one I expected.

I started to laugh.

I dissolved into a torrent of giggles that buckled my knees so I had to drop back down onto the bench and press my hands against my face to catch the tears.

While I tried to get myself back under control, I felt David’s warmth and smelled his distinct scent as he sat down beside me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right,” he said in that bland tone that meant all
that was right was my reaction to this moment. But at least it was a start.

I lifted my face, wiping my damp palms on my trousers. “I didn’t lie to you,” I said hoarsely. “Up until yesterday, I meant it. I never would have gone back. Up until three hours ago I meant it.” It was the truth. “But…something has gone very wrong, David. Somehow, this little chunk of anarchy has become a threat at the worst possible time.”

He made no reply to this, just scraped his shoes on the path as he shifted his weight. The sound reminded me of how Jerimiah had kicked at the carpet, and I remembered the suppressed anger vibrating through the whole of Misao’s frame.

“They must be desperate,” I whispered. “Why in the hell else would they want
me
back?”

David blew out a long breath. “Because you’ve survived what no one else has.”

I lifted my eyes, rendered mute again. If his sorrow had undone me, watching slow, reluctant understanding take hold in him was enough to shatter me.

“Is it really war?” he asked.

“I think it could be. It’s something bad. Misao is scared. I’ve never seen him scared before.”

“But they haven’t shown you any real evidence.”

I thought again about how Misao had said it was a sure thing—but Jerimiah, who had been there, with Bianca—inside Bianca—said they’d found no proof. I tried very hard to squelch that memory, afraid David would read the doubt in my eyes.

“They can’t show me the secured evidence until I’m under oath again.”

“No!” I rubbed the spot behind my right ear. “Because the system I’m expert in is a hot spot and is about to explode. Because they
need
me.”

Except he was right. I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t thought.

Oh, I was sure there was trouble. I believed something unprecedented was happening in Erasmus. But I hadn’t demanded real proof. They had said it, and I had believed.

David did not look away. He blinked once, as if he were perfectly calm, but he read all this in my struggling expression. At last he sighed and stared out across the city, getting lost in the lights and motion for a moment.

“We live too long,” he muttered.

I struggled to work out the connection and failed. “What?”

“We live too long,” he said again. He shoved his hair back from his head with both hands. “Three hundred years, four hundred. We create one family, two, three…we sign contracts with the people we live with like it’s possible to just shut off our feelings on a prearranged date.” He snickered and my stomach sloshed, empty and queasy.
Go away
, I’d thought.
This is not your life
. “Did you hear, they’re trying to develop a way to shut down memories of previous families so you can start your second, or third, without any…baggage. Of course, the lawyers’ll also have to develop forms so you can notify your previous family that you’ve decided to forget them so they don’t come looking for you. Except it won’t work,” he said. “I don’t care what they do. It’s all one life. Emotion gets piled on top of emotion, loyalty on top of loyalty, until we’re answering to so many masters we can’t do right by anybody.”